Gun safety replaces COVID as top concern for Cobb, Marietta schools this year

Jul. 30—On Monday, nearly 107,000 Cobb County School District students will return to class, followed by more than 8,000 Marietta City Schools students returning on Wednesday.

In the 2022-2023 school year, the third full school year since the start of the pandemic, Cobb's local districts are hoping to provide the most "back-to-normal" experience possible. Neither district will require — or recommend — face masks, nor will they be conducting contact tracing.

And, asked what is top of mind going back to school, the Cobb and Marietta superintendents both cited "school safety," as the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, continues to cast a shadow over K-12 education.

The Cobb school board voted Thursday to appoint longtime Osborne High School principal Joshua Morreale to the newly created position of assistant superintendent for school safety, which will oversee the district's safety initiatives.

Cobb also plans to have a new alert system, Centegix, up and running at all district schools by Monday.

More controversial was a policy approved two weeks ago which allows Superintendent Chris Ragsdale to add armed, non-police security personnel to schools. The policy was approved by board Republicans over the protests of Democrats and gun safety activists, who objected to adding more guns in schools and hiring staff who are not police to wield them.

Ragsdale said the district will be "picking up right where we left off: keeping Cobb the best place to teach, lead, and learn," but added that new safety measures were the main change families should be aware of.

"Thanks to our Board, parents can expect a heightened focus on student safety as we add to our public safety team and security measures in all of our school buildings," Ragsdale said. "I am very excited about Josh Morreale stepping into the new Assistant Superintendent for School Safety Operations position. He will be able to enhance and maintain our laser focus on student and staff safety throughout the year."

Marietta Superintendent Grant Rivera said Marietta schools staff have gone through additional staff training ahead of the new year and said the district is pursuing greater collaboration with local law enforcement. Families can expect to see an increased presence of school police officers as they return, he added.

"Right now, I've been advised not to go into detail about exactly what we're doing," Rivera said. "Because then, if shared publicly, that could compromise our current protocols. Somebody who might want to cause harm would then have a better sense of what we're doing and how to avoid it."

COVID takes a back seat

Asked whether Cobb would have any COVID protocols this year, Ragsdale said that "the values which successfully guided us through COVID will continue," and said recently released Georgia Milestones test scores proved that keeping schools open benefited students and reduced COVID's negative impacts on learning.

"The decisions made throughout the pandemic were based on giving flexibility and choice to our students and families," he said.

Rivera said the protocols and tracing Marietta once employed are gone. A major focus of the new year will be addressing not just learning loss and other negative impacts the pandemic created for students, but taking care of staff who were asked to go above and beyond in recent years.

"We've been talking about student learning loss and student needs and student hotspots and student meals," Rivera said. "And oftentimes those conversations came at the expense of staff needs. We asked the staff to do more, be stronger, stand in front of the kids and be the person they needed you to be, even when inside, you may have been struggling. One of our priorities ... is to make sure we are taking care of our staff."

Cobb's top public health official said spread of the BA.5 strain, currently the predominant COVID variant, has coincided with Cobb moving into high community transmission, as defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"Although most healthy children are not considered most at risk, we still have many in the community being infected and even seeing more hospitalizations in the elderly, as well as an increase in deaths," said Dr. Janet Memark. "It is very important to make sure that children are up-to-date with the COVID-19 vaccinations, as well as their other childhood vaccinations. More and more we are seeing in the news the resurgence of once forgotten diseases."

Memark added that children showing COVID symptoms should stay home from school, and that "wearing a mask is helpful in slowing down the spread."

Virtual options

While in-person classrooms will look much closer to the pre-pandemic "normal" this year, the Cobb School District offers several virtual options, which about 5,800 students took advantage of last year.

John Floresta, Cobb's chief strategy and accountability officer, said during a presentation to the Cobb school board earlier this month that the virtual programs offer choices for families with different needs and priorities.

"I repeated that word choice," Floresta said. "Each of these programs have been created in response to the needs and the request by our parents."

Cobb Virtual Academy, which dates to 2001, offers part-time online instruction for students enrolled at Cobb high schools. About 3,200 students participated last year. Floresta said the CVA also serves as a "de facto" full-time virtual school for some students.

The Cobb Online Learning Academy, meanwhile, is a full-time online program created last school year for middle and high school students. Classes meet daily, and are exclusively online. About 600 middle schoolers and 600 high schoolers were enrolled in the COLA last year.

Cobb Elementary Virtual Program, also introduced last year, is the elementary equivalent of the COLA, offering a full-time, fully virtual option. Nearly 900 elementary students across Cobb were enrolled last year.

Finally, there is Cobb Horizon High School, a "blended learning solution" that offers a mix of virtual and in-person classes targeted at students who are not on pace to graduate on time.

Cobb has said that in the coming year, each virtual class will have a dedicated online instructor. Online instructors will not be teaching in-person and virtual students simultaneously.

The Cobb School District now employs one integrated online system — the Cobb Teaching and Learning System — across traditional, virtual and blended classes, meaning students only have one place they have to log in to. The district has worked "for years" to bring all instruction under one system, Floresta said.

Marietta will not be offering a 100% virtual learning option for middle and high school students, Rivera said.

The district will, however, continue to offer non-traditional learning programs for students, such as virtual and blended classes, through the Woods-Wilkins Campus in the old Lemon Street School building. Those include the Performance Learning Center, which provides high school students with virtual and blended instruction in smaller classes.

Marietta Alternative Programs and Services, the district's alternative school, is offered for both middle and high school students and provides small, highly structured classes for students with special academic and behavioral needs.

Finally, Marietta has the Marietta Evening School Hours program, the district's night school, which offers high school students virtual and in-person classes.